stevenkesslar

Duh!

And speaking of Evil Gays. For those of you who don't get a rise from Summer's smugness, here is one of my favorite Evil Gays giving an alternative version of Econ 101. But the point is still the same. Trump is an evil incompetent piece of shit POTUS. And America and the world know it.

Larry Summers summed it all up nicely, in a Harvardy elitist way that only Larry Summers can do. Poor @Barknaway! The stupid yapping dog used TikTok so masterfully to try to persuade us that Trump was something other than an evil incompetent piece of shit POTUS. And yet here he is. An evil incompetent piece of shit POTUS, sinking in approval just like in his first term. The difference in the sequel is Trump may actually yet wreck the economy. There is an upside. My one big disappointment with Season 3 of The White Lotus is that we did not have an Evil Gays subplot, like in Seasons 1 and 2. I missed the Evil Gay Hotel Manager or the Evil Trust Fund Murdering Gays. So if Mike White is paying attention all of this could end up in a great White Lotus season. Trump is a Straight rapist, of course. But Scott Bessent has all the makings of a genuinely Evil Gay in my book. Does anyone know who he fucks in the middle of the night, when he needs to blow off some steam from cleaning up Trump's daily messes? This has potential!

Trump is a traitorous pig. He is a traitor to democracy. His pig-like brain makes him weak. He thinks he is strong and smart. But he keeps showing America and the world he is stupid and weak. As Harris warned during the debate, Putin is eating the weak traitorous pig for lunch. This traitor belongs in jail. The weak stupid pig thinks he wants peace. He is actually working to create more violence. He is allowing Putin's genocide to work.

That's an outright lie. Fox News would never do such a thing! 🙄

So that must mean black smoke coming from a Tesla signals that the old Musk is still the asshole who was not elected? 😉 Musk stepping back from government work amid plummeting Tesla sales

Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve? One who keeps tearing around One who can't move Where are the clowns? Send in the clowns Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear I thought that you'd want what I want Sorry, my dear But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns Don't bothеr, they're herе

It actually is kind of funny that Trump has the brain of a pig. It will cause tragedy all over the world. It already has in Ukraine. And the middle class and working class will be fucked royally by higher prices and perhaps a recession. But in a way it is funny, really. America is this great superpower. And yet we elect a guy we fired, who has a stupid pig brain. Why is that not funny? Let's take the stupid insolent pig's press secretary at her actual loyal groveling words. She said literally "EVERYONE in the Pentagon" is against Hegseth. So let's see. Most generals and war makers are actually NOT woke liberals. They are cold-eyed realists. So if the stupid pig's stupid PR shill is to be taken seriously, what is it that EVERYONE - all these generals and war makers - sees that the stupid pig brain of Donald Trump prevents him from seeing? It is kind of funny, when you think about it. Our POTUS has the brain of a pig. But the generals and war makers are nothing compared to Wall Street and the billionaires and the Main Street businesses. They are all screaming in unison that prices will go up and the middle class will be fucked. And increasingly that we will have a recession. Trump promised to lower prices for the middle class. So why would he do things that will raise their prices and that have already met with vastly growing disapproval by the middle class? Why does the stupid insolent pig WANT to be unpopular? Obviously he doesn't. If YOU were a stupid pig, wouldn't you want to be loved, seeing as how you are actually quite dumb? So I think the obvious answer is that generals and war makers and Wall Street and Main Street can say whatever the fuck they want. But a pig brain is a pig brain. And it is quite stupid, as Trump is proving. So the stupid insolent pig just can't help himself but do dumb shit that he can't even see is really fucking stupid. This is America. It is kind of funny when you think about it.

Or: Trump is playing a game, NOT governing. And Democrats are allowing him to do it. Geez. Haven't we seen this movie before? Wonder how it ends. The fact is Democrats have almost no power. In a way that is convenient. If they had a two seat House majority they could for sure block a lot of the worst shit. But they don't. So whether they are falling for it, or simply powerless, is a moot point. The power to block lies at the state level, with Governors, and some Democrats are using it. The more important point is that Trump is playing a game, NOT governing. The insolent pig's approval ratings are tanking. There is not much a stupid and insolent pig can do about his stupidity and insolence, is there? Our kinda lobotomized yapping dog @Barknaway did his very best, being a mostly brain dead marvel, to support the insolent pig and his dumb shit. As if Tik Tok is what most Americans rely on for the truth. I was impressed with the effort. But what is a dumb yapping loyal dog gonna do, other than mirror the stupidity of his Master? This is a shit show. It doesn't get better for the insolent pig.

HA HA FUCK YOU ASSHOLES! I PAID FOR THE GOVERNMENT I WANT YOU GAY ASSHOLES. I CAN BUY ANYTHING I WANT AND YOU CAN PROTEST YOUR FAIRY LITTLE GAY ASSES ALL YOU WANT AND FUCK YOU! YOU HAVE NO POWER. I HAVE ALL THE MONEY AND ALL THE POWER AND ALL THE CARDS. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH MONEY IN THE WORLD WITH THE DNC OR WHOEVER TO PAY FOR YOUR GAY LIBERAL ASSES TO STOP ME FROM DOING ANYTHING I WANT. SO YEAH GO GET PAID TO PROTEST WHINING POWERLESS GAY LIBERALS AND I WILL DEPORT YOU AND YOU CAN SEE HOW YOUR GAY ASS LIKES IT IN SOME PRISON IN EL SALVADOR. HA HA HA. LOSERS! YOU ARE USELESS QUEERS LIKE MY DEAD SON DAUGHTER! THE ONLY REAL PROBLEM IN AMERICA IS THE LEFT IS TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH! HA HA HA! CONSERVATIVES IN AMERICA HAVE NO MONEY OR POWER OR FREE SPEECH SO MAYBE WE JUST HAVE TO DEPORT YOUR GAY ASSES TO PROTECT OURSELVES. HA HA HA! LOSERS!

How the Bond Markets Tamed Trump It's beyond ironic that Mike Pence's former Chief of Staff is calling out the insolent pig Trump for being a dumb shit. The American people get it. The insolent pig does not. What a useless insolent pig this bankrupt leader is. By the way, is this a new Trump bankruptcy yet? To add to the irony, the Pope apparently told JD Vance that there is an afterlife. Trump apparently needs a redo on life, since he was an insolent pig this go round. The Pope told Vance Trump is due to come back as the bond market. Apparently it is God's plan. Jim Carville could not be reached for comment. 😉

In fairness, if they are White people rampaging thru our communities and schools with guns, murdering children and parents, they get our thoughts and prayers.

Well, there is good news. Trump always has to have someone to blame for his incompetent governance. With COVID he could blame it on the China virus. Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. Now his tariff nonsense will be known as the "Chiner recession". 🙄

I have: Republicans look to blunt Dems’ advantage on family tax credit Oh, wait! There's a problem. THE REPUBLICANS are the ones saying it now. I will go to the grave believing in the close race we had this one thing could have put Harris over the top. One poll I don't particularly believe is one I read a few years ago when inflation was raging, and the tax credits expired, thanks in part due to Manchin. The poll claimed that after the tax credits expired, parents who were no longer getting them shifted seven points toward the Republicans. If such a shift even happened, I don't know that it was directly cause and effect. But we know that Trump won in 2024, narrowly, with 49.8 % of the vote, thanks to inflation. And the perceived failure of Democrats to do anything about it. At the time this went down, the chief advocate of the expanded child tax credits in the House, Rosa DeLauro, said Democrats were making a big mistake. Her husband is Clinton era economic populist pollster Stan Greenberg. He has done endless polls showing raising taxes on billionaires like Elon Musk and extending help to the working class with things like child tax credits are among the most popular issues Democrats have. If you don't believe me, ask Josh Hawley, or other Republicans, who are stealing these populist ideas. Or ask AMLO in Mexico. His chosen successor, who makes Harris look a bit conservative, won in a landslide even as Kamala lost. The simple but true explanation I buy is that AMLO literally put money in the hands of the working class and seniors, despite inflation that was just as bad as in the US. It worked. He got shit done in the eyes of the Hispanic working class. Harris got slammed hard, and to some degree rightfully, because she couldn't point clearly and emphatically to how she had already fought hard for the working class on kitchen table issues. But what if she had ranted for months about how Trump will fight like hell for tax breaks for Elon Musk. And Trump will fight like hell to give Elon Musk the government he bought and deserves. And Trump will work tirelessly to fire veterans and take their health care away. But I already fought like hell for the children of working class parents. I already fought like hell to cut child poverty in half. And, frankly, I don't care if some Hispanic Dad in Michigan uses his kids' tax credits to buy a big ass truck to take his kids to school. This is America. Everyone deserves to drive a big ass truck! That's how I think Kamala could have won. That is how Ruben Gallego won by over 3.4 % in Arizona, even as Harris lost the state by 5.5 %. Instead of helping Hispanic Dads, we got democracy and Liz Cheney.

Interesting and thoughtful Politico article that goes through the debate about whether any of this makes sense. Trump wants to make a deal with China. Here’s how he’s trying to make that happen. As much as I have never been a huge fan of fabulously rich and smug Wall Street titans, I think the common sense award of the day goes to Jamie Dimon. Translation: "While you bluster your way through the volatile and poorly thought out one-man Trump Tariff Show, asshole, the rest of us will pay for the destruction with a recession."

Actually, the polls got it mostly right. In 2024 RCP's poll average showed a tie. The last average showed Harris winning by a whopping 0.1 %. Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 %. Well within the margin of error. In 2016 RCP's poll average showed Hillary winning by 3.2 %. She won the popular vote by 2.1 %. Again, very close. 2016 was when this stuff about the polls being wrong started. The predictions were wrong. But the polls, which measured popular vote, were very close to the actual results. One thing that has been reliable is that Trump, when he runs, will exceed what the polls say by a bit. And the reason is now well understood. He tends to attract unreliable voters who don't pay much attention to politics and like an asshole who will ............you know ................. just burn the fucking building down. Just fucking burn it down. Burn it down. Nuke it. Blow the whole fucking thing up, okay? That is what got Trump his slim winning non-majority (49.8 %) in 2024. And now the whole world is paying the price for it. I think it all confirms my point. Bernie and AOC have not come close to figuring out how you win 50.1 % of the vote in a pissed off and turned off country.

There's a new poll that says, among Democrats, the progressives are "winning". The popularity of the Bernie/AOC tour no doubt speaks to that. Polls Find Democrats Want a More Progressive Party 50 % want the Democratic Party to be "more progressive", compared to 24 % who want it to be more moderate. But here's the problem: I embody this challenge, which is kind of a fatal flaw. In 2016 I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, even though my heart was with Bernie. In 2020 I voted for Bernie, but only because I knew Biden was going to win the primary and I wanted to send him a message to lean left. I think I was successful. He did win, and he did lean left. But somehow that didn't build a populist majority. In 2024 I just badly did not want Trump back. Even a decomposed Biden would have been way better than this horror show. So Democrats lost 2 out of 3, and Trump won 2 out of 3. It's not completely clear why the populist right has beaten the populist left - albeit barely. And it's not clear that Bernie or Young Bernie - aka AOC - are the ticket to Democrats winning, other than in very blue places. Andy Beshear can win in Kentucky. Bernie can attract crowds there, but can't win a contest for dog catcher. But Beshear puts progressive Democrats to sleep. I think Ruy Teixeira has his finger on the pulse in his endless but wise rants. He is a liberal who yearned for, and actually predicted, an Emerging Democratic Majority decades ago. He thinks Democrats need to push the economic populism of Bernie without all the unpopular "woke" stuff. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the most recent two term Democratic Presidents, have pretty much said the same. There's a line I heard from Arizona Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego recently that in a weird way summed it up. I have my eyes on him because he did the best job in 2024 of winning a swing state that Biden lost by a higher margin than any other swing state. Gallego said something like, "Every Latino man wants to own a big ass truck." Which is why tariffs on big ass trucks won't endear Trump to Latino men. Fight for that! Not for "Latinx". The minor mystery is why the media and even Democrats are ignoring the fact that Mexico, which for most of my life was a de facto one party state, had all the same inflation problems the US and Canada had. But somehow Mexico elected a progressive Jewish woman running for the incumbent party in a landslide. I think the core thing was that AMLO fought like hell every fucking day for the Mexican working class. And men who wanted to own big ass trucks. Even as he rode the subway. He literally put money in the hands of the poor and the working class. There's a lesson there for Democrats.

Nor would I. I think of Cohn as an important figure in Trump's life. But to extend the point, it's possible to look at Cohn as a sort of key to unlocking an understanding of Trump. It helps explain a few things. First, why Trump will fail - if the job is winning a trade war or a global power struggle with China. Cohn was great at getting away with shit, as you note. And that alone gave him a certain type of respect and notoriety. But that kind of respect doesn't build alliances. Cohn did not build NATO. He was best at attacking and conning people. Second, it helps explain why some of America is attracted to Trump. Fear and loathing, basically. Cohn played a useful role when people were scared of Communists and Evil Gays and wanted an attack dog. Thankfully, Ike was POTUS and McCarthy and Cohn were just relatively minor players. The GOP Establishment could control it as a useful side show. No such luck this time! The simple but I think key problem is that you don't form alliances by bullying people. Or at least by bullying people most of the time. China has their own problems with the same. Including the coercive aspects of Belt and Road. But it seems clear already that Trump's bullying and abdication of strategic and shared democratic interests is just sending lots of nations to China.

I don't get it. Can anyone explain this to me? One simple bumper sticker that makes some sense about what Trump is doing is this: "The whole world against China." Let's forget about the fact that Republicans, more than Democrats, championed the idea that trade and outsourcing and globalization are inherently good and fair. Since billionaires like Elon Musk make more money doing it. Let's also forget that maybe it doesn't make sense to dramatically reverse course after decades of building up China with trade and investment to now say, "Oh, geez. We fucked up." What I really don't get is this. If we assume the goal of the whole world against China is good, how does Trump plan to get there by humiliating, fucking, robbing, and raping the rest of the world? Only a pathological narcissist like Trump would decide that bullying is the way to do this. Jon Stewart recently had a good interview with Oren Cass, who as much as anyone is the intellectual promoting this idea of a new America First conservatism. Cass is smart and interesting. As Stewart noted, his first claim to fame was the 2012 Romney campaign. Wasn't Romney a big promoter of free trade and global capitalism? Cass thoughtfully ticked off all the arguments that make some sense: America carries too much of the defense burden for the world, America is getting screwed by everyone on trade, blah blah blah. Let's also forget about the fact that all these pro-globalization and pro-China arrangements were put together decades ago by a country called ................... what's it's name? Oh. America! As Cass noted, nations are allowed to change their mind every century or so. But the core of the debate is that China is rising and has to be outorganized. Many Democratic foreign policy intellectuals have also been pushing the idea that in a US v. China battle, China is likely to win simply based on size, state-funded innovation, and the hunger of a rising player. While Biden was getting feeble, lots of foreign policy geeks in his Administration pushed Trump-like ideas for organizing the world against China. Rahm Emanuel has been bragging that thanks to smart diplomats like him the US had China kind of on the ropes diplomatically as well as militarily. So now the idea is that the way to build this "everyone but China" alliance is to hurt the economies of all our allies, ask them to pony up lots more for defense, and say nice things about Putin. Only a narcissist like Trump would believe that if he just appeases Putin, Putin will forget about his strategic interest in allying with China against America and democratic institutions. After all, democracy is hardly Trump's first love, either. This seems like a good formula for helping China and Russia win by pissing off every ally we have, and hurting their economies while we insult them. What am I missing?

I understand your point, Sis. But why sully a perfectly lovely word like "prostitute" ? 😉

We have an abundance of riches in Guvs. And Newsom, Whitmer, Shapiro, or Moore, to name four, are probably more likely to be able to unify the party than Rahm or Andy. But who knows? I don't think it's possible to guess yet what voters will be in the mood for after four full years of this train wreck. But it won't be Trump.

A few heartening interviews and articles about ascendant moderate Democrats: I absolutely love every moment of that interview. Particularly the part where Rahm states that the tens of millions of Americans who were screwed by globalization or left behind have every right to be furious. Of course, when he runs for POTUS he will also argue that these Trump voters have every right to be furious at Trump for trying to take their Obamacare away in 2017. And (possibly) taking their Medicaid away in 2025 to pay for Elon Musk's tax cuts. The insolent stupid pig Donald "Judas" Trump is way more stupid than Rahm. And I love it that Rahm attacks Democrats as too weak and too woke, and Trump as a corrupt man guilty of betrayal. Trump is the Judas of America. Betraying the working class that trusted him, betraying democracy, betraying Ukraine, and empowering Putin and Xi. I still have high hopes our stupid POTUS pig will find his sorry ass in jail before his destructive and narcissistic life ends. Compared to Rahm, our handsome Kentucky country boy comes off like a pussy cat: Andy Beshear has some advice for Dems on hammering Trump over tariffs I think the idea that the Guv of Kentucky or a loud-mouthed moderate Jew from Chicago, both White men, will be the Democratic nominee of 2028 is quite a stretch. But, at the very least, they will both add to a loud debate that will move the party to the center. And refocus it on the working class and away from culture wars. Good luck, guys!

It means protection of Ukrainian men, women, and children from Putin's genocide. Something you could obviously give a flying fuck about, in your own words. Trump could give a flying fuck about it to. Nor could you give a flying fuck about the absence of democracy in Genocide World. You come here to support genocide, and the mass murder of Ukrainian men, women, and children by Genocide Men. You attack efforts by Ukraine to defend itself from genocide. You are Putin's Genocide Fan.

Talk about blaming the victim! May as well go back to Trump claiming Ukraine started the war with Russia. How long did Trump's lame ass pro-authoritarianism lie last? You fail to mention that the banning of political parties occurred in March 2022. Geez, what happened then? Let me think. Hmmmmm. Oh, that's right. GENOCIDE MAN STARTED A GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE. Your murderous leader started killing Ukrainians. Shocking how Ukraine tried to defend itself from Genocide Man, isn't it? Good luck sorting your way through that. Who knows what is true and what is lies made up by spies on one side or the other? What we do know is that Putin's whole life is about spies, deception, killing opponents, and now genocide. I can see why Ukrainians would be concerned about political parties aligned with the country and leader that started a genocide against them. If you are so concerned about democracy, why not call off the war, let Ukraine have an election to join NATO and the EU, and let Russia have an election where all the real political opponents of Putin are not all killed or jailed?